Public health engineering and management educational program

In the USA today, there is a dilemma as to how to organize and administer cost-effective healthcare from primary to tertiary care. In developing countries, there is an absence of a systematic system of primary health care up to tertiary health care. The organization and planning of health services requires: formulation of performance indices of health services; methods of evaluating these indices; a basis for the allocation of resources to health services in proportion to the discrepancy between the expected and assessed performance indices; and a methodology for optimizing the healthcare performance index for a prescribed budget for each level of health service and for integrated health services, in a tertiary-care hospital as well as for a public health system at the state level. The objectives and the curriculum of such a healthcare engineering and management program are presented in this paper.